Curated playlist
University of California, Berkeley alumni
- Jack LondonJack London was born on the 12th of January, 1876, in a San Francisco neighborhood that would later burn to the ground in the earthquake of 1906. He died forty years later, on the 22nd of November, 1916, on a sleeping porch of a cottage on…
- Philip K. DickPhilip K. Dick died on the 2nd of March 1982, in a Santa Ana hospital, having never seen the film that would make his name famous. Blade Runner opened four months later. His daughter had to bury his ashes next to the grave of his twin…
- Roger SessionsRoger Sessions was born on the 28th of December, 1896, in Brooklyn, New York. His mother, Ruth Huntington Sessions, was a direct descendant of Samuel Huntington, a signatory of the Declaration of Independence. That genealogical link to the…
- Stith ThompsonStith Thompson was born in Bloomfield, Nelson County, Kentucky on the 7th of March 1885. He grew up as the son of John Warden and Eliza McClaskey. His family moved to Indianapolis when he turned twelve years old. This shift placed him near…
- David J. PetersonDavid J. Peterson built languages for worlds that do not exist. In 2009, HBO needed a language for the Dothraki people in Game of Thrones, and they turned to an organization Peterson had co-founded just two years earlier: the Language…
- Daniel KahnemanDaniel Kahneman was born on the 5th of March, 1934, in Tel Aviv, while it was still the British Mandate of Palestine. He would go on to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2002 despite never having taken a single economics…
- Rodney StarkRodney William Stark grew up in Jamestown, North Dakota, in a Lutheran family, attended journalism school, and spent several years as a newspaper reporter before anyone might have guessed he would one day reshape how scholars think about…
- Timothy LearyTimothy Francis Leary was arrested 36 times between the 1960s and 1970s, a record that tells you something about how seriously the American establishment took him. President Richard Nixon called him "the most dangerous man in America".…
- Tim SchaferTim Schafer was born on the 26th of July, 1967, in Sonoma, California, the youngest of five children. His path to becoming one of gaming's most celebrated storytellers began not with a grand ambition but with a single job listing at…
- Jack VanceJack Vance published his first story in the summer of 1945 in Thrilling Wonder Stories. It ran sixteen pages. Over the next seven decades, he would go on to write more than sixty books, possibly close to ninety, across science fiction,…
- Lawrence KleinLawrence Robert Klein was born in Omaha, Nebraska, on the 14th of September 1920, and he would go on to reshape how governments and central banks understand their own economies. At the heart of his life's work was a deceptively simple…
- Roger RevelleRoger Randall Dougan Revelle was, by his own account, the grandfather of the greenhouse effect. That was how he described himself to a reporter after receiving the National Medal of Science in 1991, just months before his death. The phrase…